Ferdinand Christian Baur

Ferdinand Christian Baur, (born June 21, 1792, Schmiden, near Stuttgart, Württemberg [Germany]—died December 2, 1860, Tübingen), German theologian and scholar who initiated the Protestant Tübingen school of biblical criticism and who has been called the father of modern studies in church history.

Educated at the seminary at Blaubeuren and at the University of Tübingen, Baur became a professor of theology in 1817 at the seminary and in 1826 at the university, where he remained until his death. Influenced by the thought of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Baur began to develop a new perspective on the history of Christianity.

In general, Hegel saw history as a working out of opposing forces—thesis and antithesis—which interact and form a third force, known as the synthesis. In studying the New Testament’s pastoral letters, Baur came to view early Christianity as the outcome of a conflict between Jewish Christianity (an amalgam of practices of the two faiths) and Gentile Christianity (which was viewed as free of Jewish influence). Baur held that Jewish Christianity was the thesis; the Gentile version was the antithesis, or reaction; and catholic Christianity constituted the Hegelian synthesis.

In his Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (1845; Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ), Baur applied the same principles to the life and thought of the apostle Paul and concluded that Paul did not write all of the letters then attributed to him. Baur considered only the letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, and Romans to be genuinely Pauline. In addition, he believed that the author of Acts was postapostolic; Acts appeared to him to synthesize and harmonize the conflict between Jewish and Gentile Christianity and hence could not have been written in the 1st century, when a portrayal of Jewish and Gentile Christianity would have shown more clearly the conflict between them.

Baur took a similar view of the authorship of the Gospels; his conclusions became known as the “tendency theory,” for he asserted that the Gospels reveal a mediating, or conciliatory, Tendenz of their authors to overcome the Jewish-Gentile conflict. Baur posited the existence of an initial Gospel modified by later writers.

Later in life Baur concentrated on church history. His five-volume Geschichte der christlichen Kirche (1853–63; “History of the Christian Church”) is still considered valuable, as are his works on the doctrines of the Atonement, the Trinity, and the Incarnation. Baur’s methods helped to make Christianity subject to critical historical examination. His ideas were rejected at first, but both his methods and his conclusions emerged in the 20th century as important contributions to biblical scholarship and the study of church history.